Intuitive Fitness For Hypothalamic Amenorrhea Recovery

You’ve done SO MUCH work to get your cycle back, so to reintroduce exercise back into your life on a regular basis can be tough – what if you undo all your hard work and lose your period again?

Or maybe you’re early on in recovery and want to try a massive reduction or change in exercise intensity to see if you can recover that way.

Well, maybe “intuitive fitness” is for you.

I’m not an intuitive fitness expert, but over the past year and a half I’ve definitely learned a thing or two about it, created my own concepts and one of my best friends and I, Adee Cazayoux, even coined the term ‘too easy fitness’ to go along with it. We were going to start a little workout community based around it and everything! Maybe we still will, I don’t know...let me know if this sounds interesting to you by the end of the article haha.

Intuitive fitness is the concept of listening to your body to decide whether or not a work out is for you today, and to go a step further and figure out what that work out should be.

I’m going to give you a few different ways you could approach it, and you can take what sounds good to you and leave the rest. That’s important to do because intuitive fitness should be pretty individualized and there isn’t really one set way to do it. It’s simply whatever method works best for you.

Before we dive in though, some expectations should be set.

Intuitive fitness is unlikely to bring you a whole lot of gains in terms of strength, muscle growth and performance. Intuitive fitness is more about keeping your body moving, maintaining strength, reaping the physical and mental benefits from regular exercise and keeping the joints, organs and muscles functioning and well lubricated. Use it or lose it, ya know? So set your expectations accordingly.

How to Work Out Intuitively

Setting maximums

We’re starting with setting maximums because a lot of us need to put boundaries up around exercise and something that holds us up is a fear of not being able to be objective about whether or not exercise is right for us.

If this is the case, I recommend setting a 3 or 4 workout a week maximum so that you don’t get to tell yourself that “every day I want to intuitively work out”.

Now if we’re talking intuitive movement that might be a little different, but right now we’re talking about intentional exercise. So, set a maximum amount of work outs per week you want to be doing. This will btoh give you permission to actually say no when you’re not feeling it, with plenty of opportunity to say yes when you really are feeling it.

Making up your own programing

Choosing your own workouts and creating programs is one of the harder skills, so I want to get it done and dusted early on here.

As the name intuitive fitness implies, you’re following your intuition here. This means you’re not exactly able to plan a months program in advance – you have no idea how you’ll feel next week! But if you have a background is athletics, personal training or anything that gives you a generally good foundation in writing programming, why not have a go at deciding your workouts for yourself on a day to day basis?

I did this for a long time. I’ve been both a competitive olympic weightlifter, a frequent CrossFitter and I have a PT certification (which to be honest I got over 10 years ago but hey) so I feel confident in my ability to program something for myself that makes sense.

When I’m following my intuition to create a program, I’m asking myself the following questions:

How's my energy today?

Understanding where your energy is at allows you to choose movements and an intensity that is suitable for the day. See The Grip Test and What Would Your Vagina Say? below for more advice around answering this question.

What did you do yesterday?

Keeping in mind what you did yesterday allows you to choose something polar opposite today so you don’t exhaust yourself. For example if you did something more legs based last workout, it makes sense to choose your upper body as more of a focus today. Or if you did more of an endurance workout, say a long walk, a run, time on the bike or a circuit that made you breathe heavy, it makes sense to do more of a strength or resistance type workout today.

What do you need to feel good today?

Knowing how you want to feel later on today allows you to choose movements and an intensity that makes you feel good. If I want to feel refreshed and awake, I might opt to breathe a little heavier in a quick workout. If I want to feel strong and capable today, I might hit some squats or dynamic movements like box jumps to make me feel more explosive and badass.

What have you been avoiding?

We all have the tendencies to sway towards things that we enjoy more, that come naturally to us and that don’t intimidate us. What does your intuition tell you you’ve been avoiding? For me, I hate boring little technical things like Turkish get ups and isometric, slow movements, so my intuition lets me know that now’s the time to add a little in.


Following a program and tweaking

Following a program and making tweaks to it each day is honestly a lot easier than writing my own programs, especially since getting pregnant. I am WAY to tired and busy to be building out my own workout program right now.

My intuition also tells me that I will choose rubbish movements and now is just not the time for me to fully create my own workouts.

I’ve actually started using a simple workout program called Street Parking that I pay for monthly. It’s simple workouts and accessory days, but they have something called “mama modifications” which is for pregnant and postpartum women to make modifications to some of the movements. I think they’re great modifications for keeping intensity under control for HA’ers and their workouts are generally really quick, so it removes the likelihood that you’ll spend longer than necessary working out. They’re also done from home so that eliminates the issue of going to the gym. This isn’t at all sponsored by them, just what I use.

How to change workouts after assessing what you need for the day

Removing rounds, reps or sets

If a workout is a circuit of 6 rounds, I might do 5, 4 or even 3 rounds instead.

If it’s a lot of reps, I might do half of the reps.

If it’s a lot of sets, I might do half of the sets.

You get it.

Removing the weight

Just like removing the rounds, I might reduce the weight to half or even no weight at all.

Removing the intensity

This is an important one. If the program says to push yourself hard and that doesn’t feel good today OR you’re in recovery and it’s not a good plan right now, don’t do it.

Let’s break this down a little more.

Whether you’re a runner, lifter, CrossFitter or something else, you have a tendency to push the intensity. I mean, that’s how you grow when you work out, right? With intuitive fitness and especially if you’re in HA recovery still, you need to be removing intensity.

This means listening to your body and removing the need to complete something in a certain amount of time.

This means being open to saying you’re going to do 6 rounds of a workout and then getting half way through and realizing you’re probably only feeling up to doing 3 rounds today.

This means implementing strategies like nose breathing only, where you try to complete a workout with your mouth closed and only breathing through your nose. That’s an amazing way to keep intensity down. Or the talk test – can you keep a conversation going or keep singing a song while you work out?

If you’re recovered and feeling good one day about pushing intensity, that’s great. You’re tapping into your intuition about what feels right to do today. If you have a hunch that maybe you’re ignoring your intuition and continuing to push, intuitive fitness may not be for you right now.

A walk is a workout

This is a short and sweet one, but if a walk sounds good today, that’s definitely enough and it counts.

Incorporate other activities as exercise

Just like the walk, consider other activities that are not just about getting your sweat on. Think ‘blue zoners’ – the population of the world that seem to live the longest and most healthy lives. Studies show they have a tendency to do things like gardening, playing sports and dancing.

Can you tune in to your intuition and see if any of those activities sounds good?

Some of the things I incorporate here are DIY projects at home, gardening, playing with my pup, seeing if my husband wants to go on an adventure or maybe even have sex.

The Grip Test

Here’s a more tactical tip when you’re looking for more assistance with your intuition.

The grip test typically tests your grip strength and there is a whole fancy mechanism for measuring the results, but in this situation, you could quite simply use it to test your readiness to train.

Set yourself a baseline on a “good day” – i.e a day where you feel full of energy and you’ve not worked out yet. Grab something like a hardish squeezy ball, a barbell clip – the spring kind – or something that is generally hard to squeeze. Now squeeze it as hard as you can, slowly, like once per 2 seconds, and count them. When you start to feel your squeeze tire, stop. That’s your baseline.

Now in the future, you can test it to see how you feel. Did you get up to your usual number or did you fall short? If you fall short, it’s an indicator of your readiness to train.

Remember that if this is new, after a few times you could get a little stronger so it might be worth retesting your grip baseline after a few weeks or a month.

What would your vagina say?

In the book Pussy, A Reclamation I learned about the concept of asking your vagina what it would say to do. I now use this with almost all my clients who struggle with resting.

Our need to work out comes from a masculine energy, a place in us that wants to push and strive for greatness, achievement and perfection. This is definitely not our feminine place.

Our feminine place is slower, more patient, more relaxed. This is an area that we want to get tapped back into – and it makes sense right? Our literal period is missing.

The practice is simple, when you’re weighing up a decision to do something masculine, like workout, diet, overbook yourself or push yourself in any way past your comfort zone, check in with your vagina and ask it, what do YOU want to do?

Sounds weird, I know but TRUST ME. It’s really hard to lie about what your vagina would say. My clients have LOVED this exercise and come back the next week with amazing feedback on how it helped them make the next best decision.

There ARE some days where your vagina will say “girl, let’s DO this. Let’s do an awesome workout and get our sweat on” and there are going to be even more days where it asks you to take it more easy and maybe take it for a walk in nature.

So, next time your figuring out how hard to push yourself that day, ask, “what does my vagina want to do today?” and let it lead you.

I LOVE seeing the results of this so much that I’d love for you to try and and shoot me a DM or tag me in an Instagram story or something and show me what your vagina told you to do today! I’m hoping to see some ladies dying by the pool or taking a stroll in nature. Or just going back to bed!

Brutal Honesty – the Too Easy System

To successfully use intuitive fitness, you must be brutally honest with yourself. Are you making this decision to workout, and how hard to work out, from a place of having followed the tips I’ve mentioned?

Are you doing this from a place of wanting to keep your body moving, or a place of weight loss or HA recovery damage control?

I mentioned the earlier the Too Easy workouts I made up with my friend. We went through a period of time while I was recovering and she was pregnant and focusing on her business where we tackled exercise with a “too easy” mindset.

This is actually an Australian phrase used a lot to indicate that something is not a problem at all. Like “hey, can I have a glass of water?” “oh too easy!”. Or “can you come over tomorrow at 10?” “too easy”.

So we started calling our program the ‘too easy’ program. Where if its not TOO EASY, it’s too hard. We’d send eachother a marco polo or photo of what we’re doing that day that’s too easy.

Sometimes it was a walk, a short circuit, a quick bike ride – just basic things that were simple, not taxing and didn’t take up too much of our time.

We actually want to start a free community around it that helps women get motivated to work out simply and ENJOY it VS push themselves. A place for women to not like the only one not working themselves into the ground – ya know?

We are slowly working on this free community, so if you’re interested make sure you join my email list to get updates and we’ll let you know when it’s opened up. Enough women need to register an interest for us to actually do this...but we think it would be really cool! Register your email below!

Need help balancing your recovery and your exercise? Get a coach.

Work with us 1:1 to recover your cycle in a way that works best with your lifestyle. So if working out is important to you but so is getting your period, you’ll benefit from having the support and guidance of an HA recovery coach.